We bought a house

Offer accepted on a house in Sydenham. More than we hoped. And in a different place. What was the inner suburbs. Have I betrayed the inner city?

What I observed as looked for houses was that London is always in flux. We found elderly West Indians who had bought early in Peckham, not selling to young white couples, before moving out to Bromley. Norwood, I remember from the 80s as an affluent white area, now black.

A few years ago, I read an article about how the inner suburbs were going to become poor because of lack of investment. Now indeed, they look tacky. And the presence of working class people [white and black] betrays their downward class journey.

But now, the relatively lower house prices portend incipient gentrification. Even in Sydenham, estate agents references to artists and musicians reveals the first-stage colonisation of lebensraum by creative affluenzers, soon to be replaced by the longterm settlers of the bourgeoisie.

But on the street, where we may live, each time, we have witnessed a police incident – arrest, questioning, chase. Does this do my inverted snobbishness good? Or is it a sign of the mixed, dialectical zigzag progress of the urban form?